Stu Levitan welcomes Madison native Michael Massey, the award-winning composer, songwriter, pianist and performer whose musical resume include co-founding the bands Chaser and Boys in White, writing the score to the Madison Ballet production Dracula: A Rock Ballet, being a featured performer in the Mad Cabaret, Furious Bongos and Piano Fondue, releasing several solo albums including Be Careful How you Say Pianist, the Present and Attack of the Delicious, and perhaps his greatest musical accomplishment, one in which I actually played a small part, as a ringer for the legendary garage band Johnny and the Nakomans. He lives with his wife Robin in a house they just built on the driftless prairie outside Barneveld WI, on land that’s been in his family for eleven decades.
Mike got drunk for the first time in August 1973 on a trip to Houston with the choir from Trinity Lutheran Church. He would get drunk a lot over the next 20 years before he took his last drink on October 13, 1993. He writes about those twenty years of alcoholism, and the 29 years of sobriety in a moving and powerful memoir entitled More, just out from the good people at Little Creek Press. Along with a number of Michael’s lyrics, there are some great archival photos – including two with Andy Warhol, the subject of one of Chaser’s songs. With its narrative of recovery and redemption, it is a very appropriate book to feature as we start a new year, and it is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend Michael Massey.
RACHEL WERNER AND HER MANY TALENTS
Author Beth Nguyen discusses her new memoir, "Owner of a Lonely Heart"
Poet Daniel Khalastchi on Wordplay, the Collision of Images, and White Whales
Angela Trudell Vasquez on Poetry in her Life
Madison Poet Cynthia Marie Hoffman On “Exploding Head”
Bending Granite Tells Tales Of Leading Organizational Change
Ann Garvin On Writing Her First Book At Age Fifty
Cynthia Simmons On The “Wrong Kind Of Paper”
Fragile Institutions: Shibani Mahtani And Timothy McLaughlin on the 2019 Protests in Hong Kong
Jacquelyn Mitchard On The Importance of Titles
A conversation with Greg Mickells, retiring director of Madison Public Library
It’s Not Nothing: Essayist Peter Coviello on How Our Favorite Books and Songs Help Us Make Worlds Together
Madison's Shoshauna Shy on bringing poetry to the public
Heather Swan’s Lyrical Language Of Beauty And Devastation
Thomas Pearson, Author Of An Ordinary Future, On Disability And Difference
The Dane County Farmers' Market Cookbook With Food Writer Terese Allen
Prof. Stephen Kantrowitz, ”Citizens Of A Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History Of The 19th Century United States.”
The Life And Music Of Al Jarreau
Poet Tacey M. Atsitty on Risking Your Heart and Being Swallowed Up
UW Prof. Stephen Kantrowitz, "Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the 19th Century United States "
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Lit Society: Books and Drama
Ex Libris
Write The Book: Conversations on Craft
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Fresh Air
Myths and Legends